by Francis King
‘Would you be a dear and pour me a cup? I’m afraid of lifting up the pot. I’d probably drop it in my present state.’
His mouth and eyes sulky, he carefully poured out the tea. Then he held out the cup: ‘OK?’
‘Lovely. Just what I need.’ She sipped and, though the tea burned her tongue, sipped again. Then she set down the cup. ‘Mehmet,’ she began.
‘Yes, Mamma?’ She could see that her tension had transmitted itself to him.
How was she to begin? She had rehearsed her lines but now, an actress drying with stage fright, she had forgotten them. ‘ I was thinking about your – your suggestion.’
‘My suggestion, Mamma?’
She wished that he would drop that irritating Mamma. ‘Yes. You know – you know the one.’ She shrank from saying the word marriage, since it would be so humiliating.
‘Yes, Mamma?’ Deliberately he placed his spoon in the empty cereal bowl and then reached out to the toast rack. Clearly, like her, he was determined to pretend that this was a breakfast like any other breakfast.
‘It wouldn’t be right, love,’ she said abruptly. Then putting a hand over her eyes, as though the early sunshine through the window were too much for her, she added: ‘I couldn’t do it.’
There was a long silence, during which he merely stared at her with unblinking hostility. Then in a hissing voice, he said: ‘I thought you my friend.’
For the first time Meg felt that he was not a friend but a stranger and enemy. Then that horrible moment passed and she began tentatively: ‘ No, Mehmet – don’t you see? – it wouldn’t be right. Not for me it wouldn’t.’
‘You mean – illegal?’
‘Oh, no! Of course not! I don’t care whether it’s illegal or not. It’s just – just Eric.’
‘Eric!’
She knew why the name exploded out of him like that. She had so often complained to him of Eric’s sudden desertion – like a rat leaving a sinking ship, she had said on more than one occasion. He must be thinking: Why take a rat into consideration now? ‘What you have to understand, love, is that, though he behaved so bad to me at the end, we did have our good times. Yes, many of them. We were together for – what? – almost twelve years and there was never a cross word between us. Well, not really a cross word.’ She was speaking in a tenderly reminiscent, beseeching tone; but so far from reconciling him to her decision, she could see that it was only making him even more indignant. ‘You can’t live like that, with a man, with your husband, for all that time and not – not – well, feel he’s part of you. For better or worse. That’s what you say, isn’t it? I mean, when you marry.’
‘I say? I say nothing!’ His fury suddenly gushed out of him in a scalding, malodorous stream. ‘I thought you my friend, my only friend. But you like all English. Racists. Hypocrites. You pretend you like me but when I ask something, something easy, something simple, then it is other matter.’ He gave a contemptuous, snorting laugh. ‘Yes, it is always other matter.’
She quailed under this onslaught. She wanted to flee the kitchen but she wondered if her legs would be up to it. The pins and needles were no longer pricking at them; instead, they were twitching with spasm after spasm. ‘You must try to understand, Mehmet. I’d do anything for you. But any day – perhaps even now – Eric might return. That happens, you know. When I was a small girl, there was this neighbour, a council gardener he was. His wife suddenly vanished, just like that, he came home, tea laid, no sign of her. She was away, oh, it must have been for quite as long as Eric. And then, one day, cool as a cucumber, she was back. What had she been doing? He never learned. Never. Perhaps he didn’t want to know. My guess is that she went off with another bloke and eventually thought better of it. But there you are!’
As she gave this account, his face showed an increasing derision. ‘And you think Eric gone off with another woman?’
‘Oh, no! I’m sure not. Well, I don’t think so. No. I think it was just that he was worn out, poor soul. He just couldn’t shoulder the burden of looking after me any longer. Well, I understood that – not at first, of course, but after I’d had time to think about it. Some people have a gift for looking after others, it comes natural to them. You have that gift,’ she added tentatively, looking across at him with woebegone eyes. ‘But my poor old Eric didn’t. Not his fault. That was how he was made.’
With an exclamation of disgust – as though he could not bear to listen to all this nonsense any longer – Mehmet jumped to his feet. ‘OK, OK! You do not wish to help me. Thank you, Mamma, thank you!’ The sarcasm was brutal. ‘Never mind. Mehmet will think of something else – someone else. Yes! Never mind!’
He strode out of the kitchen and into his room. Meg laid her crossed arms on the table and rested her head on them. Her head was pounding and she felt a stabbing sensation in her left eye. Then she heard his feet hurrying down the corridor and the front door first opening and then being slammed shut.
That was that. It was all over. He would come back, of course, for his bits and pieces, but he wouldn’t stay now, not after she’d behaved so badly to him. It was terrible when you could only stick
by one person if you chucked
crossed, she sat up erect in the
out a single, jerky sob.
the other overboard. Arms still
chair and then, involuntarily, let
That afternoon, cool as a cucumber, as though all that rumpus had never taken place, Mehmet entered the flat. He was whistling tonelessly as he walked down to the bathroom, and Meg could still hear the whistling, shrill and slightly off key, along with the noise of his peeing. The walls were as thin as paper, she would often complain.
Her heart began to accelerate, as though there were a fist inside her chest which kept hammering there. Would he come in to the sitting-room to confront her or would he go straight to his room?
Pulling a comb through his wiry, close-cropped black hair – at moments of affection she loved to run her finger through it – he stood on the threshold.
‘How’s Mamma?’
He smiled, he walked towards her. She tried not to shrink away from him. Then he stooped, put a hand on her shoulder, and kissed her.
It was a return just like any other of his returns.
Chapter Twelve
‘Oh, it’s you.’ Involuntarily, having opened the front door, Audrey pushed it towards him, as though to bar his entry, instead of drawing it farther back. The sun, low in the early evening sky, was just behind him and all she could make out, having come from the gloom of the basement, was a dark silhouette. But she knew at once who it was.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Carter.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Ahmeti.’
They always addressed each other with this formality. ‘Why don’t you use his Christian name?’ Marilyn had once asked Audrey, who had replied: ‘ Because he hasn’t got one. He isn’t a Christian.’ ‘His first name, I mean,’ Marilyn had then countered irritably.
‘Is Dr Carter in?’
‘I’m afraid not. She had to go out urgently to see a patient.’
‘She away long time?’
‘I’ve no idea. One never knows. Someone has had a fall.’ Her voice sounded as though she were clipping at the words with a pair of scissors. She was still holding the front door almost closed, after having resisted the temptation to put it on the latch. He might have been some bedraggled stranger who, having rung the bell, had then held out the permit dangling round his neck, before asking her if she wanted to buy some sponges, dishcloths or mops at a price far higher than she would have had to pay at any supermarket.
‘Maybe I wait.’
‘Well …’ She did not at all like to admit him to the house. But if she sent him away, she knew that Marilyn would be furious with her. ‘ Oh, all right. Come in!’ At last she pulled the door wide open, but she still remained where she had been standing, so that he had to edge in sideways past her. ‘You’d better wait in the sitting-room,’ she told him, and then at on
ce wished that she had said the library. With its few bookcases, most of them paperbacks, its seldom used television set and its ironing board and iron, the room hardly merited that description and was seldom used. What now recommended it to her was the absence in it of any small objects of value. The sitting-room, on the other hand, was full of them – including some Chinese snuff bottles, Laurence’s property on long-term loan, which, set out on a shelf, would be all too easy to rifle. To date, she had had no proof of Mehmet’s dishonesty, but she was sure that one day, sooner rather than later, it would reveal itself.
Mehmet entered the sitting room. She remained in the door-way, reluctant to let him out of her sight but not in the least wanting to sit there with him, a wary guardian. With anyone else in similar circumstances – Carmen on some errand, a patient out of surgery hours, even the window cleaner – she would have had no qualms about immediately quitting the room. To Carmen she might even have first offered something to drink. Ah, well! She had better to get back to those shop accounts. ‘I’ll leave you then,’ she said.
As she turned away, she heard his resonant voice: ‘Miss Carter!’ She hated that voice, because it was so often audible to her from this room or even from Marilyn’s bedroom, when she had left doors open in her basement.
‘Yes?’ There was a sharp upward inflection, which said: Please don’t bother me.
‘I have question to ask you.’
‘Oh. Yes? And what is your question?’
He smiled at her in that spuriously winning way of his. Then his soft gaze suddenly hardened and his mouth hardened with it. ‘Why you dislike me, Miss Carter?’
She was so much taken aback by this sudden verbal blow that she recoiled, as though at a physical one. ‘I don’t dislike you.’ But there was no conviction in it. He was right, of course. From the first she had disliked him. ‘There’s something chilly and chilling about him, like a snake,’ she had once confided to Laurence, and he had then laughed, shaken his head and said: ‘That sounds awfully melodramatic and not in the least like sweet, tolerant you.’
Once again smiling – apart from that chipped, discoloured eyetooth, she had always had to acknowledge that his smile had singular charm – he nodded his head. ‘Yes, Miss Carter, you dislike me. But what I done? Nothing. I am polite to you, nothing bad. I am friend of Dr Carter. Is that wrong? Yes?’
She did not know what to say. She could not say: ‘I don’t trust you. You’re up to something. I’m afraid of what you might do to my sister-in-law.’
Stubbornly she repeated: ‘I don’t dislike you. You’ve got it all wrong.’
But of course, as he obviously knew, he had got it all right.
‘I’ll leave you then,’ she said, wishing that her voice did not quaver.
He turned away from her and reached for the copy of the local paper that had been pushed through the door that morning.
Audrey had often wished that her hearing were not so acute; she had also often wished that the house, jerry-built at a time when a Napoleonic invasion had appeared to be imminent, were not so flimsy. One began to hammer a nail into the wall and at once one heard a patter, as of small rodents scattering behind the elegant wallpaper. One began to settle to reading a book and, as though one were a sudden victim of tinnitus, one would hear Marilyn dropping her shoes to the floor of her sitting-room and then, barefoot, pouring out one of her over-large measures of vodka before causing the sofa to creak as she collapsed into it.
When at last Marilyn returned from the visit to her patient, Audrey had no wish to listen to what she said to Mehmet or Mehmet to her. But snatches of conversation, disconnected but vaguely disturbing, kept drifting down – ‘God what a day!’ ‘You’re looking terrific,’ ‘Let’s go out, let’s try that Tunisian restaurant,’ from Marilyn, and from him: ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing. I walk, walk, walk. Nothing,’ ‘Truly I am depressed, broken down,’ and then, far more loudly, ‘Yes, yes, yes! Now, now!’
Audrey knew what it was that he wanted Now, now. She always knew. There was a long silence – she imagined him holding Marilyn and kissing her, and then her pushing him away with a whisper or a sigh – and, after that, the regular, slow heartbeat of feet ascending the stairs. They couldn’t have enough of it, she thought. Well, he was probably a terrific lover. People said that East Europeans were. There was that crude, jolly Australian, an actress out of work, who used to help out in the shop. She had a lover from – where? – Bosnia or somewhere like that – and she was constantly arriving late, yawning and exclaiming ‘God, I’m worn out’, before embarking on a detailed account, continued even when customers were in the shop, of all that she and her lover had been doing all through the night. ‘He never wants to stop. I say ‘‘ Enough is enough’’ but, bloody hell and thanks be to God, enough is never enough for that one.’
Now the thumping and thudding started, soon followed by the groans (she never knew whether they came from Marilyn, from him or from both of them) and the moans, hers much higher than his. Then, inevitably, there was his ‘ Yes, yes, yes!’ on a crescendo. It was not, she told herself, that she was in the least bit puritanical. For eleven years she had carried on an affair with the chief accountant at the publishers where she worked, so discreetly that no one, she was sure, had even guessed at it. Often both of them would stay late in the office, on the pretext of having an accumulation of work to finish. Often he would take her to a little Sussex Gardens hotel, spartan but clean, with a cramped en suite bathroom containing a sitz-bath and a bidet, for a few hours. Sometimes he would come to the Brompton Square house, if Laurence were away. Secretive by nature, she never spoke to Laurence about the affair and she was sure that, like her office colleagues, he was totally unaware of it. In fact, his antennae were so sensitive that he had soon guessed, from her unexplained or inadequately explained absences, her sudden high spirits and her no less sudden lapses into depression, that something was going on; but he was unable to define precisely what that something was and even wondered whether Audrey might not be having what he called a ding-dong with another woman. Either way, he did not care. He was only telling the truth when he boasted: ‘ Nothing shocks me.’
The reason why Audrey’s colleague would not marry her was that he was already married to a woman, a lecturer at Imperial College, who suffered from manic depression. He couldn’t possibly leave her, he would tell Audrey, it would be too cruel in her fragile mental state, it might finish her off; and Audrey would then be filled with both sadness and admiration for his decency. In the end, he did leave her, but not for Audrey but for someone far younger, a tiny, babyish, doll-like creature, with bubbles of pinkish-blonde hair falling round her face, who had recently come, straight from university, to work as a secretary in the firm. When, in a turmoil of grief and anger, she had confided in Laurence – he had found her crying alone at the kitchen table and had asked what was the matter – he had patted her shoulder and said, inadvertently cruel but intending to comfort her: ‘A banal tragedy. I’m so sorry.’ After a brief rage against him, she had later thought forgivingly: Didn’t Hannah Arendt write of the banality of evil? Well, her father was right, tragedy was all too often also banal.
The noises from upstairs had become far louder than they had ever been in the past. Audrey gritted her teeth, threw down her book, and then leapt up and turned off the television. Arms crossed and head cocked, she stood in the centre of the room, avidly listening and yet disgusted with herself for doing so. Had Marilyn lost her reason? No one would expect a woman in her late thirties to remain faithful to the memory of a husband now dead for more than three years. But when she knew so many men eligible as lovers or even husbands, why pick on someone so ghastly? Of course he was attractive, in his gigolo way, with those wide shoulders and those narrow hips and that pale, clear skin and those eyes that could within a few seconds turn from being soft and lambent with sympathy into glittering with a dangerous allure. But he and she belonged to totally different worlds, with nothing in common but their greed for sex. O
ne might as well have an affair because of a shared passion for lobster or caviar!
Oh, it was too squalid to stand here deliberately listening. She hurried to the kitchen, switched on the portable wireless, and then, when the noise from above still penetrated through that, turned up the volume to maximum. After that, she sat down at the kitchen table and began to polish some silver. This was not a task that Marilyn would ever undertake. Laurence would often refer to his daughter and daughter-in-law as Martha and Mary. She was bitterly aware that it was the Mary whom, like Christ, he preferred to the Martha.
Eventually, after the ‘Das Lied von Der Erde’ had drawn to its close and the clapping and occasional ‘Bravo!’ emerged, disagreeably distorted, from the old wireless, she heard Marilyn and Mehmet coming down the stairs. On a shameful impulse, she put out a hand, switched off the set and then stood motionless, listening once more.
‘What about trying that Turkish place?’ she heard Marilyn asking.
There was a silence. Probably he was shaking his head or looking unenthusiastic.
‘Or we could go to Momo. You like Momo. Though it is rather expensive,’ Marilyn added.
‘Yes, Momo!’ He was eager. Of course he wouldn’t care a damn if it was expensive or not, Audrey thought.
‘Where have I put my bag? … Oh, yes, here it is! Are my keys in it? Yes.’
Another silence, briefer then the previous one. Then: ‘Marilyn, do not be cross with Mehmet. Please! I have something to ask you.’
Money, money! Audrey thought, with a mixture of fury and triumph.
‘Yes?’
‘Can you lend me some money? I am – sorry – I am broke again.’
‘Oh.’ Audrey imagined the look of consternation on Marilyn’s face. Women never felt humiliation when asked by women for a loan, but they usually did when asked by men. ‘Oh, Mehmet! It was only last Tuesday that I –’
‘Yes, I know, I know. But – my landlady … Again she say I must pay her money, some money, or I must go. I have nowhere to go. You say I cannot stay here. Sorry, Marilyn. Sorry.’